Every year, McAffee publishes a big report on global cybercrime. In the intervening years between McAffee's first report and yesterday's report, cybercrime has gone from "geeks in bedrooms" to organized criminal organizations and now, according to McAffee, is an real threat to national security.

A couple of interesting things were looked at this latest report. The "three major findings" for this year's report are: cybercrime is becoming increasingly sophisticated, with a large growth in phising and 'social engineering' type of attacks;  websites selling illicit software and hacking tools are becoming big buisness, with a blackmarket for 0-day exploits popping up; and cyber-espoinage is becoming increasingly important.

The report spends a lot of pages going over the cyber-espionage angle of global cybercrime this year. McAffee asks the question: "Are we in the midst of a cyber global war and a race for cyber supremacy?" Well the report says that 120 countries are involed in cyber-espionage, most of the fingers are pointed at the Chinese government. For instance, last June, the Pentagon itself was attacked, and these attacks were believed to have originated in China. Other cyber attacks, also said to be instigated by the Chinese government, took 160 gigabytes of information from Federal government computers in Germany; attacks on India, New Zealand, and Australia are also mentioned in the report. The shutting down of much of Estonia's Internet ability through a D.o.S attack from a bot-network was also looked at, though this attack was thought to be the work of Russsians. 

Just a few hours ago Chinese government officials denied these allegations. "China has also been attacked by hackers of some countries, so the Chinese government attaches great importance to and participates in the international law enforcement cooperation in this area," said China's foreign ministry spokesperson, Liu Jianchao (source).

The Internet's old friend, Storm Worm, also gets a look at by McAffee. Storm is labeled a "Genetically Modified 'Super' Threat' by the writers of the report.

The section of the report dealing with the cybercrime blackmarket is very interesting. Apparently this market is becoming so competitive that now customer service has become a selling point. Want to lease a botnet? A zombie computer might cost you $35 bucks a week. Custom written software to get you bank numbers or access can be had from between $25 and $1500 USD. Or maybe a credit cards number, for $5? Quite the deals.

Although I would not expect a company that relies on cybercrime to propel its company growth to ever issue a report saying things are looking optimistic, the report is a stimulating read, and be can be acquired over here.